Major,
Minor
Philosophy
Programs
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Philosophy,
Courses
PHIL 120: Philosophical Inquiry
Credits 4Introduces students to philosophical thinking as well as to figures in the history of philosophy. Topics vary. Stresses careful reading of primary sources. Recent topics include philosophy and film, ethics and political life, and environmental ethics.
PHIL 130: Symbolic Logic
Credits 3The study of formal, deductive logic emphasizing the methods for demonstrating the validity of arguments. Includes truth functional propositional logic and quantification theory through the logic of relations.
PHIL 155: Ancient Greek Philosophy
Credits 4An examination of Greek philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratic period and emphasizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. Reading is mainly in the primary sources.
PHIL 180: Existentialism
Credits 3Explores the question of the meaning of human existence as it has been discussed primarily from the late 19th century to the present day. Draws on a variety of resources, including plays, short stories, films and traditional philosophical texts in the existentialist tradition. Topics may include the notion of individuality, the nature of freedom and its limits, one's relationship to God, and one's responsibility to the community.
PHIL 204: Women Thinkers of the 20th Century
Credits 4Examines the thought of women of the 20th century born in the West and the East. Special attention to the influences and critiques within and across these two traditions. Sources include works in aesthetics, phenomenology, feminism and literature.
PHIL 206: Philosophy of Sport
Credits 3This course serves as both an introduction to and a comprehensive study of the philosophy of sport. In addition to engaging with questions about ethical & aesthetic dimensions of sports, it will engage with political questions concerning race, gender and nationality as well as economic questions.
PHIL 207: From the Avant-Garde to the Aesthetics of the Familiar
Credits 3Discusses the meaning of the avant-garde. De-canonizes the avant-garde through the perspective of everyday aesthetics. Artworks and texts range from a broad spectrum, e.g., Continental, Eastern, Black-American and Latino.
PHIL 218: Politics, Philosophy and Peace
Credits 4Explores the intersection of politics, philosophy and peace through one or various authors. Topics include discussions on the conceptions of community, communication, pluralism and migration. Re-assesses the meaning of the political.
PHIL 218: Politics, Philosophy and Peace
Credits 4Explores the intersection of politics, philosophy and peace through one or various authors. Topics include discussions on the conceptions of community, communication, pluralism and migration. Re-assesses the meaning of the political. This course may be best for sophomore standing and above.
PHIL 230: Topics in Aesthetics
Credits 3Introductory course in aesthetics. Examines a topic or issue that is of importance to historical or contemporary philosophical aesthetics. Topics include the experience of art and the philosophical implications of its creation and reception; the relationship between politics and art; and the cultural impact of various art media, including but not limited to, literature, film and classical representational pieces. Depending upon the topic, readings chosen from works by classical and contemporary philosophers, art critics and artists themselves.
PHIL 250: Modern Philosophy
Credits 4Focuses on European philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Readings from primary sources introduce students to traditional epistemological and metaphysical questions in the western philosophical tradition.
PHIL 252: Philosophy and Film Theory
Credits 4Investigates the relationship between philosophical ideas and visual narratives. Examines the philosophical foundations of various theories of film and interprets visual narratives in terms of philosophical ideas.
PHIL 280: Seminar
Credits 4An intermediate seminar on a single figure, topic or movement. Oral participation is as important as written work. Recent topics include feminist philosophies, skepticism, postcolonial theory, Heidegger and the ethics of belief.
PHIL 305: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
Credits 3This course investigates psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan as well as feminist, postcolonial and cultural responses to it. In addition to reading primary texts, it will critically analyze how psychoanalysis understood, misunderstood and modified throughout its history.
PHIL 310: Philosophy of Law
Credits 4"What is Law" in the context of legal structure, power, rule and obligation. This course examines the relations between legal rules and the rules of ethics and custom, the case for civil disobedience, the difference between law and mere coercion, the social and ethical foundation of law and legitimacy, the limits of law and the state, citizens' rights against the state and one another, and the norms of our legal system, their beneficiaries and alternatives.
PHIL 315: Marxism
Credits 4An examination of the Marxist intellectual traditions with an emphasis on the writings of Marx. Examines Marx's critique of capitalism and alienation in his early writing to his more formal analysis of capitalism in his work Capital. Looks at how later Marxists and critics of capitalism have used, criticized and reworked elements of the Marxian analysis to continue developing contemporary conceptions of a non-capitalist or classless society.
PHIL 330: Postcolonial Theory
Credits 4A study of selected topics in Postcolonial Theory. Investigates the philosophical presuppositions of these topics and the relationship between Modern philosophy and European Colonialism.
PHIL 350: 19th Century Philosophy
Credits 4Covers the movement of thought in Europe after Kant, focusing on such topics as the study of culture and the human sciences, the rise and fall of idealism, philosophy's turn to historicism, the concept and consciousness of modernity, and the fate of critical philosophy — or philosophy as critique — after Kant. Figures studied may include Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
PHIL 362: Western Political Philosophy II
Credits 3An examination of the central ideas of modern political philosophers. Attention to major primary works by Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Mill, Marx and Nietzsche.
PHIL 363: Bioethics
Credits 4Introduces students to the major theoretical discussions and practical actions in the field of bioethics, with a focus on the implications that these discourses and practices have for a diverse and multicultural world. Includes an introduction to essential bioethical terminology and to a breadth of ethical theories and perspectives. Specific topics covered may include: human subject research, genetic technologies, justice and health care allocation, end of life alternatives, and so on.
PHIL 365: Philosophy of Language
Credits 3Examines current topics in the philosophy of language as discussed in both the continental and analytic traditions of philosophy. Topics include the origin of language, question of meaning, relationship of language and the world, relationship between language and human subjectivity, question of ambiguity in dialogue, evolution of language in community and feminist critique of linguistic philosophy.
PHIL 460: Contemporary Philosophy
Credits 4Covers a number of the main figures and movements in 20th- and 21st-century continental philosophy. Figures studied may include Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Wittgenstein. Movements studied may include classical phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, feminism, critical theory, philosophy of language and contemporary epistemology. Some analytic philosophers may be read to explore the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy.
PHIL 480: Seminar
Credits 4An advanced seminar on a single figure, topic or movement. Oral participation is as important as written work. Recent topics include feminist philosophies, skepticism, postcolonial theory, Kant's second and third Critiques, Heidegger and the ethics of belief.
PHIL 487: Senior Capstone Experience I
Credits 3Students in this course will develop their research and writing skills in preparation for writing a thesis length essay in PHIL 488 Senior Capstone II. Participants will learn to do research and writing by way of library instruction, peer-review writing, and bibliographic development. This teaching-learning process will necessarily involve "awakening the 'teacher within'" by requiring all participants to assume the role of teaching the seminar some aspect of their research. The essays the students produce in this seminar will subsequently be evaluated by the Philosophy Department as a whole and not solely by the seminar's instructor of record.
PHIL 488: Senior Capstone Experience II
Credits 3The second semester seniors in this course extends the research begun in PHIL 488 Senior Capstone Experience I with a view toward preparing the first semester's work for presentation at Earlham's Annual Research Conference and possibly for publication in an undergraduate philosophy journal. Additionally, this course will provide instruction preparing students for an oral exam at the end of the semester in the subject area they have been researching. If adjustments are needed to this schedule to allow for off-campus study or other reasons, students may petition the Philosophy Department in writing with a rationale supporting a proposal for a different schedule.